Susan K. Harris

Expertise and Current Research Activity

My field is American literature and culture, particularly of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I am a Mark Twain scholar, and also a scholar of American women’s writings. I think that literary studies generally, and American literature in particular, are of increasing importance to our world: writers are often the bellwethers for cultural change, and the “documents” they produce in the forms of stories, novels, essays, and poems help us to understand our past and to make reasoned judgments about our futures.

My teaching is geared towards helping students read critically, always aware that writers are speaking into particular historical contexts, and that we can learn from their insights. My research and scholarship also probe the past in order to understand the present: I am awed by Mark Twain’s prescience about Americans’ sense of themselves and their place in the global order, and my research into American women writers of the 19th century has taught me a great deal about the slow process of reform in American culture.

I have recently published a book, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902, that uses Mark Twain’s responses to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899 as a means of examining the role that religious rhetoric played in the debates over whether or not the Philippines should become a part of the United States. The debates at the turn into the 20th century don’t sound significantly different from our own debates about American identity and citizenship, and I think that a close study of the issues, the policies that resulted from the debates, and the consequences of those policies over time, are immensely useful for helping us determine our responsibilities both domestically and internationally. The writers that I study are deeply engaged in such issues, and they give us a point of view outside of the usual commentary by politicians, journalists, and historians.

Recently, I have been very engaged in developing courses in U.S. Immigrant Literature. One of the assignments asks students to develop presentations on the authors’ countries of origin, with special attention to the circumstances that propelled their families to emigrate. These presentations have brought the world into our classroom, and the students’ horizons have been wonderfully widened in the process.